In 2017 the United States finds itself
with a billionaire president who
defeated, as adjudged by electoral
college votes, the
multimillionaire Hillary Clinton. In
fact, high political office in the US
has become a stepping stone to personal
enrichment. Barack Obama is
cashing in now with exorbitant book
deals and speaking fees.

It is highly illustrative of the
divide between the working masses and
the 1%-ers of Wall Street who
effectively own the American political
system. The politicians know the voters
want change, but they also know who
butters their bread. Empty campaign
promises are followed by endless
betrayals.

While the common folk fight
asymmetrical US wars far from American
shores, the fat cat Wall Street
investors profit from the violence. It
is nothing new. In the introduction to
Scott Noble’s Plutocracy: Class War
we find 19th century president
Rutherford B. Hayes writing in his diary
that the United States had become a
government “of corporations, by
corporations and for corporations.”

Noble is a brilliant thinker and
excellent filmmaker. Working with the
tightest of budgets he has produced
several significant documentaries on
power relations and the human condition
– all available at
Metanoia Films for free viewing.
Metanoia’s recent release is the third
installment of the Plutocracy series. It
is set around the period of the First
World War, a time of unprecedented labor
unrest and state repression.

Class War begins in Ludlow,
Colorado with the massacre instigated by
the robber baron J.D. Rockefeller using
the Colorado National Guard. Troops
machine gunned a tent city housing
striking coal miners and their families
then set fire to the camp. Eleven
children, two women and ten miners were
killed. The Ludlow Massacre epitomizes
how government has used violence at the
behest of wealthy industrialists against
the working class.

The
War Against Workers and the Poor

A Review of Plutocracy: Class War from
Metanoia Films

By Kim Petersen

In 2017 the
United States finds itself with a
billionaire president who defeated, as
adjudged by electoral college votes, the
multimillionaire Hillary Clinton.
In fact, high political office in the US has
become a stepping stone to personal
enrichment. Barack Obama is
cashing in
now with exorbitant book deals and speaking
fees.

It
is highly illustrative of the divide between
the working masses and the 1%-ers of Wall
Street who effectively own the American
political system. The politicians know the
voters want change, but they also know who
butters their bread. Empty campaign promises
are followed by endless betrayals.

While the common folk fight asymmetrical US
wars far from American shores, the fat cat
Wall Street investors profit from the
violence. It is nothing new. In the
introduction to Scott Noble’s
Plutocracy: Class War we find 19th
century president Rutherford B. Hayes
writing in his diary that the United States
had become a government “of corporations, by
corporations and for corporations.”

Noble is a
brilliant thinker and excellent filmmaker.
Working with the tightest of budgets he has
produced several significant documentaries
on power relations and the human condition –
all available at
Metanoia Films
for free viewing. Metanoia’s recent release
is the third installment of the Plutocracy
series. It is set around the period of the
First World War, a time of unprecedented
labor unrest and state repression.

Class War
begins in Ludlow, Colorado with the massacre
instigated by the robber baron J.D.
Rockefeller using the Colorado National
Guard. Troops machine gunned a tent city
housing striking coal miners and their
families then set fire to the camp. Eleven
children, two women and ten miners were
killed. The Ludlow Massacre epitomizes how
government has used violence at the behest
of wealthy industrialists against the
working class.

Class War tells
the tale of the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW), known as the Wobblies. The
Wobblies were an anarcho-syndicalist union
open to all skill levels, races, and sexes.
Such progressivism was met with state
violence, including the use of torture.
Frightened of their appeal to poor workers,
several states banned Wobblies from public
speaking.

As
activist Brian Jones explains in the film,
the Wobblies were “unwilling to accept terms
of exploitation.” They devised innovative
tactics such as sit-down strikes and
revolving picket lines. This was an
unacceptable challenged to the owner class.
The organs of the state, police, security
forces, and the so-called justice system
were bent to the cause of the robber barons.

Class War
tells of Joe Hill, an IWW-union organizer
and popular singer, song-writer. Among his
songs was “Preacher and Slave” – a response
to the Salvation Army preaching docility to
workers. Eventually Hill was tried for the
murder of a grocer and executed by firing
squad. The evidence implicating Hill was
flimsy at best. According to the film, the
more likely culprit was a petty criminal
named Magnus Olsen, who went on to serve as
a bodyguard for the gangster Al Capone.

Class War
tells many stories of men and women who
resisted the oppression of the age. Along
with Joe Hill, we learn of Mother Jones,
Lucy Parsons, Helen Keller, Frank Little,
Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Rosa
Luxemburg, Anna Louise Strong and more. The
fight for the dignity of labor was vast.

When a movement
becomes large, the age-old tactic is to
divide it. The advent of WWI provided the
state with such a divisive tool. The IWW was
anti-war, but president Woodrow Wilson
secured the volte-face of the American
Federation of Labor whose union head Samuel
Gompers was offered a government advisory
position. Gompers was anti-IWW and an
anti-socialist. This eased the government’s
push for US entry into WWI. In his book
The Great Class War 1914-1918,
historian Jacques R. Pauwels compellingly
paints WWI
as a class-war instrument.

Anti-war socialist Eugene Debs noted that
workers were the chattel for wars. He
captured the public sentiment such that, in
1916, one group of Nebraska citizens
petitioned for a constitutional amendment
whereby any politician casting a vote for
war would be required to volunteer for war
duty. Needless to say, the petition failed.

Graeme MacQueen of the Center for Peace
Studies notes in the film that WWI was
engineered by European aristocrats and
capitalists. Competing and collapsing
empires sought to secure resources,
territory, slaves, and markets. At the time,
the conflict was openly praised by leaders
as a “romantic adventure.” The reality was
more akin to a “slaughterhouse.”

A
split occurred among women’s groups and
socialists in opposition to war. This split
was brought about by – as Christopher
Simpson, author of The Science of
Coercion comments – “feel good
propaganda,” as well as the slandering of
anti-war people as cowards and traitors. In
Illinois, a German immigrant and socialist
named Robert Prayger was lynched after being
falsely accused of being a German spy.

Propaganda, disinformation, and false flags
were part of the imperialist repertoire. The
ocean liner RMS Lusitania carrying
munitions from New York to England was sunk
by a German U-boat. Americans on board were
sacrificed; American conscription was
enacted. In Oklahoma, on August 1917, a
coalition of desperately poor sharecroppers
and tenant farmers opposed to conscription
and the war began a march on Washington. It
was called the Green Corn Rebellion. Notably
the coalition was multi-racial, made up of
blacks, whites, and Mukogee people. The
rebellion was violently halted by posses
organized by business leaders and state
officials.

The
Wobblies were entrenched as enemy number
one. Two leaders (Frank Mooney and Warren
Billings) were framed for a bombing in San
Francisco and spent 20 years in prison. IWW
offices were raided and union leaders
arrested under the Espionage Act — which
prohibited any attempts to interfere with
the war effort. Among others imprisoned
under the legislation were socialist leader
Eugene Debs and anarchist leader Ricardo
Flores Magon.

Following the horrifying Prospector mine
disaster in Butte, Montana, IWW leader Frank
Little arrived and urged Americans to “fight
the capitalists but not the Germans.” He was
lynched by “capitalists interests” the next
day. Little’s murder was especially brutal:
he was tied to the bumper of a car wearing
only his underwear and dragged down the
street for several miles, then strangled to
death. No suspects were charged by
authorities, some of whom were considered
complicit.

State actors and right-wing vigilante groups
such as the Klu Klux Klan and American
Protective League (APL) terrorized unionists
and socialists, culminating in the Red
Scare. The Sedition and Immigration Acts of
1918 sought to further curb the actions of
dissidents, allowing for the deportation of
anarchists and other “undesirables.” It was
during this period that the Bureau of
Investigation (later the FBI) became a force
to be reckoned with. A new “radical”
division headed up by a young J. Edgar
Hoover engaged in a campaign of terror
against poor immigrants. Their tactics
included assault, false imprisonment,
unconstitutional search and seizure, the use
of agent provocateurs, and ultimately
deportation.

Worker
rights could be viewed as a backdrop to WWI.
The war caused an industrial boom. The
cotton crop decimations led to the migration
of African Americans northward. They were
met with hostility and later race riots.
Unlike most liberal and quasi-left analyses
of racism, the film does not blame “white
people” as a group. Instead it draws
attention to the ways in which poor workers
were turned against each other in their
desperate attempts to survive in a
capitalist economy.

The
year 1919 was a high point for strikes.
Class War winds up in Seattle where
workers staged a general strike for the
right to a living wage, worker safety, and
free speech. Labor sought to avoid harming
others through the strike and issued passes
for necessary work (e.g., doctors and
nurses). Nonetheless, the workers’ vision
for a just society was again put down by the
state.

Class War
documents how the government has always
sided with money against the worker. The
state’s arsenal against unions and labor has
included war, propaganda, disinformation,
agents provocateurs, violence, false flags,
state agents (police, FBI, vigilantes, the
attorney general, courts), and the so-called
justice system.

The
film presents a plethora of information,
with first-rate narration, at an appropriate
pace for it to sink in. There are plenty of
fascinating snippets of little known
history, and there are also some
inspirational sequences to offset the often
grim subject matter. Class War is a
necessary backgrounder to understanding our
present situation. The viewer will be able
to identify obvious parallels with current
events.

Filmmaker Scott
Noble hopes to bring the Plutocracy
documentary series to the present day. I
hope to see that. Metanoia Films is
currently raising funds to complete
subsequent entries in this worthy series.
You can donate
here.

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